But the hand did not move. Before his eyes, as he stood there, it was ... melting ... oozing away into the ground in stinking rivulets of slime. Numbly, Boone moved along it; and now, incredibly, he could see its termination, just below the rim of the nearest hills. For it was an arm without a body--an arm that trailed off into nothing, like a figure cast in wax. Yet there too lay the carrier, crushed and crumpled ... the broken bodies of the men. This limp, dead arm had done that.... It was more than human mind could take. Boone slumped to the ground and cowered there, shaking. Nor would the seizure pass. It was as if he suddenly were chilling. Cold crept through his veins in icy tendrils to the very marrow of his bones. Harder and harder he shook. Yet still no surcease came. His whole body was aching now and it dawned upon him, dimly, that no shock alone could leave him thus yet still alive. Then, at long last, the chills and cold departed, driven out by a quick, fierce heat. His mouth grew dry. His tongue took on new thickness. Flowers, hills, wreckage--all seemed distorted. He burned as with a flaming fever.... Fever--? He knew, then. _Titan fever!_ What else could it be, here on Hyperion, but that strange pyrexia that mutated Man's gametes? So there was no hope for him, no answer.... He never knew for sure what happened after that--how much was reality, how much fever-madness. For delirium came, and in that state he wandered. The hills rolled down in lowering barriers of menace, and flowers talked to him, and he walked beside strange streams. And then, sometimes, it seemed that Eileen stood beside him ... that he could hear her rippling laughter echo, and taste her lips, and smell the fragrance of her hair. But Eileen was still a prisoner of the Helgae, sealed in a sphere somewhere within their weird, domed cities. That meant he had to find her. So he wandered on, babbling of mekronal and chandak ... precious chandak, the only remedy that could save him from his fate. And Krobis was there, too, and Terral--all the others. Sometimes they mocked; sometimes they helped him. Not that it mattered. For now, all at once, he could get away from his own body, floating cloud-like in space beneath three great green suns. The monsters came, then. * * * * * The first was in the image of the Helgae--lumpish, mottled, but with a yawning orifice that he knew somehow was meant to be a mouth. Twice it tried to swallow him as he floated, then faded away again when he rolled away beyond its reach. The second took the appearance of his own father. Its face pressed close, all clipped mustache and burning eyes and shiny skin. He shrank before it. But the face kept following him, pressing closer, and the feeling grew within him that if the tight grey lips should ever open, he would surely die. So he surged away in utter terror ... fled through the green-tinged sky-sea around him.